Windows 8 is a new operating system that was released in October of 2012. It is a Windows 7-like operating system with some new features and improvements. One of the new features of Windows 8 is the ability to create custom shutdown shortcuts. This article will show you how to create custom shutdown shortcuts in Windows 8. To begin, open the Start screen and type “shutdown”. The Shutdown screen will appear, showing you a list of available shutdown options. You can select one of these options to start the shutdown process: Shutdown by pressing the “Shutdown” key combination. This will start the shutdown process and display a dialog box asking if you want to continue or stop it. If you press “Continue”, Windows 8 will continue running even if your computer has no power left. If you press “Stop”, Windows 8 will stop running and turn off your computer. Shutdown by using the mouse wheel on your desktop or laptop computer’s keyboard (or by pressing CTRL+SHUTDOWN on a touchpad). This will start the shutdown process but also display a dialog box asking if you want to continue or stop it. If you press “Continue”, Windows 8 will continue running even if your computer has no power left; however, when you move your mouse wheel or use CTRL+SHUTDOWN, Windows 8 won’t start until you release the key (or hit CTRL+C on a touchpad). If you press “Stop”, Windows 8 will turn off your computer and exit from the Shutdown screen.
It’s easy to customize and move all the Windows tiles around, but what if you want to create your own shortcuts for portable apps, or something really useful, like adding the missing Shutdown or Reboot shortcuts back? Here’s how to do it.
Note: we’re sure that as Windows 8 is improved over time, there will be better methods to do this, but this is the method that we used. If you know of something else, let us know.
Creating Windows 8 Metro Shortcuts
Open up Explorer and head to the following path:
Once you’re there, you can browse down into one of the folders, though you can probably leave the shortcut in that folder as well.
Create your shortcut for whatever you’d like – for instance, we created a Shutdown shortcut using our guide to creating shutdown or reboot shortcuts, which is really just a link to shutdown.exe. It’s useful to assign a good icon to the shortcut as well.
Now that you’ve done that, hit the Windows key to head back to Metro, and then type in “shutdown” or whatever the name of your shortcut is.
You’ll see it on the left side, and right-click it to select it (if you’re using touch you can nudge it up or down, I think).
Click the Pin icon on the bottom right-hand corner…
And now you’ll have the new shortcut on the main screen! Of course, it’ll be created all the way over on the right side, so you’ll need to drag it where you want it.
What shortcuts are you going to create?
